March 17, 2010 New York Section 8 from 0.5 to 5.0 South to North and New York Section 7 from 0.0 to 3.7 [AT: 8.2 miles]
With Sona. St. Patrick’s Day but neither of us wore green! Still winter but the temperature was warm and we had sun! In fact it was so warm that we began to worry that we didn’t bring enough water. From the beginning of the hike through to the end we had to worry about blow-downs on the trail. Most people think of blow-downs as trees that had blown across the trail and you had to climb over the trunks, but these were mostly medium size branches and small tree tops with all the branching little twigs – impossible to climb over. You pretty much had to either move it off the trail or go off-trail and walk around it. We did our share of trail work today.
About half way through the walk we came up to a pond where the wood frogs were really singing up a chorus. As we got closer, they gradually stopped. We could see several floating in the water with their back legs splayed out. Funny you don’t think of frogs floating that way.
We had had quite a few rain storms and high winds (hence the blow-downs). The rain made things quite wet along the trail. We had several places where there trail as more like a “Stream-trail” picking our way along rocks emerging from the wet. Here’s a couple of places we just decided to go off trail – I think you can see why…
Flooded trail
One of the big blow-downs
After the hike we went for ice cream in Cold Spring.
lindasnature
